Sunday, February 27, 2011

Running Commentary

I love two year olds.
Or maybe just mine, since I'm not around a lot of other two year olds.

In the last few weeks his vocabulary has skyrocketed and mixed with his new found imagination, hilarity ensues. Or maybe it's just me that finds his babble funny.

He's always been good with words. He had over 50 at a year and a half plus he was doing sign language. He's always been good as communicating, but it was always few-word sentences. Now the sentences don't seem to stop before he's on to the next point.

A few of these I've posted on facebook already, but this is a collection of the things he's said to me in the last week.

Toby:"You hear the full moon coming up!"
Me:"You can hear the moon Toby?"
Toby:"Yeah. You heard it coming up at night time and then maybe the the maybe the sun comes out and then you can't see it anymore because the moon goes down and then you can see better in the sun and we go outside and shovel out our snow castle maybe..."

This was accompanied by a lot of nose wrinkling and shrugging the way I do when I say 'I dont know' or 'maybe'.

We have a baby pine plantation in our once open fields and the tops of the trees are just visible above the snow. Since the snow is now hard enough to walk on we've been inspecting the trees lately. When we were out a few days ago he was walking behind me with a running commentary and part of it included:
"Maybe we can go shovel up the snow in the field and put it on top of the pine trees like *plomp plomp plomp* and to help them grow a bit and then they can get flowers on them and then they can turn into jets"

.........ok?

He seems to have this new fascination with jets. We saw two in a row fly over our house on a really clear day and since I was trying to convince him to go for a walk with me I said we might see some jets if we were out in the field and away from all the trees. We did end up seeing another jet. So now he thinks the live in the field.

Last night he had a fixation with the cats running outside.
"Chaos running by, no actually Squeak and Moses running by and Opa out there too running with them and shoveling the path!"

...Toby it's 9:30 at night, I think Opa is at home since it's really dark outside...

He also names birds out our window and there's usually a daily commentary about how many blue jays came and if we saw the yellow-bellied sap sucker that day and that the evening grosbeaks were chasing each other.
My mom rolls her eyes and says he's as nauseating as I was at that age. There's videos of me walking through the bush at almost 3 years and naming every plant we saw without being prompted.

That night he was drawing me pictures with great gusto while I watched.

-"One big wheeeeel. Other big wheeeel. Tractor engiiiiine. Monkey on it..."
"There's a monkey driving your tractor?"
"Yeah there's one leeeeeg and the other leeeeeg hanging down in the snow! And here's the dirt and grass he mowing up!"

-"Airplane! There one wing... and it goes BBBRRRMM in the sky. and here's the grass and OH stairs going up! Stairs up so Toby can see the plane better! And them some of that heeeere..."
"Is that the exhaust from the plane?"
"Actually those are milkweed seeds. THIS is exhaust...*scribbles*"

But the best part of my week, was this morning. When he first wakes up is usually when the most entertaining things happen. All the non-talking that happened while he was sleeping comes out in a huge verbal explosion.

At first, I was still exhausted so I nodded and 'mmhmmed' while he muttered and then he crawled over top of me to get to the basket of books we have sitting on our bed. He flipped through them and finally went "oooooh art books..."

We have two Petit Connoisseur books called Fashion and Art.

They are funny little visual puns geared for babies. Toby knows them off by heart but we havn't read them in a while so it was funny the be lying there with my eyes closed and hear:

"Sooooo Stylish... ooo chic....Slide shoe! And it's like a slide!......oooh elephant trunk show...and the little diapers... they not for Toby though, just for little boys. Not for Toby.. just little boys... mommy?"
"Toby, you ARE a boy.. those could be trunks for you..."
"No, not Toby... OTHER little boys... and girls... but not Toby's"
"Oh ok, if they're someone else's thats fine"
"....OOOOHHHH Cubism!!"

Love.

And then when I started to wake up and he got bored of reading and realized I was actually awake...:

"Go outside and feed the birds maybe. Go outside and feed the birds and take the feeder down and put seed in it because so the birds can eat their lunch and then we hang it back up because it's...empty" He shrugged and wrinkled his nose.
"I don't think we would hang it up if it was empty Toby, that's why we took it down to put seed in it"
"But THEN because the birds eat their lunch and we go out and give them the seeds and then it's ampty and we have to go put more in"
"Well, yes when the birds eat it all we put more seed in, but I think we actually did that yesterday so we don't need to feed them today."
"Huh...hmmm...*squints out the window* OH! An oak tree! There's an oak tree way back there! Look mommy!"
"Yeah I think most of the trees out there are maple trees Toby"
"There was an oak tree waaaaaaaay back in the field and that's where the jet was I mean that's where the jet lived and sometimes when we go in the field then they can fly over our house"
He paused at this point and got the 'poop look' on his face.
"Are you pooping Toby?"
Another pause.
"Nope. You not pooping you have a bit of gas in your diaper and the pee. Just pee and gas in your diaper because you a bit gassy but not pooping."

I nearly died laughing. He's looking at me like... what....And I'm turning blue in the face trying not laugh to hard at him.

So what is it that makes one kid 'tick' differently than another? People say that boys are slower at vocabulary than girls, but Toby never had trouble with words. People say that their two year old speaks maybe 10 words and poor sentences, so how does their brain develop differently than Toby's? Is it mostly genetic? Is it mostly the daily conversation babies hear until they can talk?

Well, whatever has clicked inside Toby's head has clicked full gear and he seems to be spilling forth all the streams of consciousness that have been in his head for the last year.
Sometimes life is fun with a little running commentary.